Every website is at its best the moment it ships. After that, according to Pierre Burgy, co-founder and CEO of the open-source headless CMS Strapi, it starts to drift. The site does not break, but the market moves, messaging shifts, and competitors launch new things. A year later, the site is not broken, just behind.
Burgy, writing about lessons learned building Fimo (an autonomous website platform incubated at Strapi), says most teams treat this decay as inevitable. His argument is that it does not have to be. Agents working after launch could catch things a busy team never gets to: a design-system update that never propagated to a pricing page, uncompressed images from a rushed release, or an accessibility regression introduced by a new component.
Why Full Autonomy Falls Flat
The obvious next step, once agents are capable enough, is to hand them the entire site. Burgy says that is exactly what his team tried first, and what they found was hesitation. Not because users distrusted the agents, but because a website has no single owner. Different parts belong to different stakeholders, each wanting a different degree of control.
That reframes the real question: not whether to trust automation, but where to draw the line, and for whom. Burgy splits website work into three categories.
- The no-brainer majority: rule-bound, repetitive maintenance such as accessibility compliance, propagating design-system tokens, fixing broken meta tags, optimizing images, and repairing rotted links. This is described as the bulk of what keeps a site healthy, work nobody was hired to do by hand and work agents handle well because it is governed by rules rather than taste.
- The untouchable core: judgment calls about what a page should feel like or whether it is genuinely good. Agents can verify contrast ratios, heading order, and style-guide compliance, but they cannot make the taste-based calls that define a brand. This is the smallest pile of work, but the one people are most protective of.
- The contested middle: decisions like defaulting to dark mode for new visitors, which an agent could execute instantly but which different stakeholders (a designer protecting brand identity versus, say, a growth-focused team member) might weigh very differently.
What It Means For Site Owners
For WordPress site owners and hosting professionals, the practical takeaway is less about a specific product and more about a framework: most ongoing maintenance work such as accessibility checks, image optimization, link hygiene, and design consistency is a strong candidate for automation, while brand and design judgment calls should stay firmly with humans. The middle ground, where a change is technically easy but organizationally sensitive, is where teams will need clear rules about who gets to say yes.